Simpedia

Sheri R., California

This is an interesting question which I don’t know the answer to!  It seems that the more you can reconstruct the components after a song is thoughtless the better for keeping the song alive and for learning other songs. Once a song is thoughtless it seems there can be a lot of muscle memory going on. If it’s not played in a while it can be easily lost if while you were getting it to the thoughtless stage, and even after, you weren’t staying in some capacity aware of the components or chunks of information that helped you to learn it in the first place.

Maybe “thoughtless” means you can play the songs without thinking about what you are doing, but underneath that ease we still want students to understand and know the parts and structure even though they may not be fully conscious of it while playing. If the songs become completely thoughtless then how does one cross pollinate? Related to this I try to incorporate questions into lessons shortly after as well as months after learning a song to help keep the components alive, such as “what is LH of sentence one of Dreams.”

Someone once told me that exams at a music school would include requests like “play measure 11 and 12 of page 13 [of a particular piece].” Don’t know quite where that fits into this conversation but that seems to imply a knowledge of the various parts.

Terri P., Michigan

I’m not sure if “thoughtlessness” is the right place to be. I think the student has to get past the “thoughtlessness” stage. They have to be able to TEACH it.  After the “thoughtless” stage, not right after it has been taught to them, or after they have just watched the video. Then, I think they truly know it.

Dane A., California

I would use the term “automatic” with students.

Beth S., Tennessee

It hurts my head to think that I should have to remember all the different steps in order to truly know something. Any task becomes fun when I’m able to do it automatically without thinking. To me, this is thoughtlessness. Once a student learns a piece well and thoughtlessly, I don’t insist they then recreate the learning clues. Maybe I’ve been neglectful in this or haven’t been teaching properly, but that was not what I understood as being thoughtless. I understood it to be a natural process that occurs when anything becomes ingrained and habitual, and that this was an end goal.

When I first learned to drive, I thought about every step of driving; i.e. how close was I to the center line, where were my hands on the steering wheel, how soon would I brake before stopping, etc. etc. Now I can drive all the way downtown with no real memory of the trip there; my mind was thinking on other things and my body just got me there automatically somehow. The steps to driving are no longer a part of my life.

I don’t see why playing the piano needs to be any different, and why it’s necessary to keep thinking of all the steps involved. I don’t remember Neil saying any of this in the training; consequently, I’ve not pursued the pushing of my students to teach back all the steps, but then maybe I’ve missed something along the way?

Along the same vein of discussion, I played a song in my high school years and some thereafter — it was a lively, competition piece “Le Cavalier Fantastique” by Benjamin Godard (in case anyone knows of it). It was a piece I loved and played often (it’s so showy and thrilling to perform), but after the last time I performed it (about 15 years ago), it got put on the shelf and forgotten. Last year I started thinking about this piece again and was wanting to play it only I couldn’t find my music of it, the local music store didn’t have it, and I couldn’t find it anywhere online to purchase. All I remembered were the first few measures and nothing more. So I sat at the piano and played those few measures over and over and over. Then miraculously another measure came on its own. So I played all of that over and over, and then another little section came and I played that much over and over. Within a day or two the entire piece came back, and the whole process was almost thoughtless in itself. It’s like all I did was provide the hands, but the brain brought it all back on its own. I played it at my piano party a fortnight ago, and even now when I play it, I don’t think of the elements involved; it’s just all on auto-pilot and consequently is so much fun!

So after that experience, I wonder, do the steps even matter once the material has been initially programmed into the brain? Is it really necessary to keep trying to remember all that?

Sheri R., California

I’ve never had this experience Beth because I never memorized anything in my youth. It’s kind of amazing! Really remarkable! I wonder how many times one has to play a song for that to happen. By the way, how many pages is the song?

As I’m learning a lovely arrangement right now of Somewhere Over the Rainbow I am developing ease gradually and the more time I spend with it the more I see the building blocks (which makes me very happy!), and which is helping me to really know it.  It will become automatic (I like that term that Dane Andrus used) eventually but I think even in it’s “automatic-ness”, I will still be aware of how the song is put together, which I think is actually a good thing.

I think understanding the components that make up a song after the song is learnt will have a big impact on improvising and composing, as well as learning subsequent songs. My understanding is we do want to attain the auto-pilot state of knowingness like you said (driving analogy); but I think if we want to capitalize on the tools we’re gaining we also want, after a song has become automatic, to have the capacity to play it with awareness of it’s parts. I really find that the more I bring myself to keep coming back to a well-known song and approach it from the point-of-view of really seeing the parts, the easier it is to learn and retain new songs and the more music is demystified for me.

In my previous traditional glued-to-the-page life, I really didn’t ever see relationships (oh, the left hand is playing notes from a 7th chord and the right hand is too, wow, what a revelation, there’s actually some logic here!). I want to be able to, if I get lost in a song, find my way out of trouble by playing some notes that could work instead of coming to a complete standstill. I think the more we keep the steps alive the deeper is the students knowing and hence the richer the students’ experience.

So in conclusion I agree that automaticness is an important goal and very fun and where we can really express ourselves in the music, and at the same time I think an equally important goal is also to be able to step back from that knowingness and deconstruct that automaticness at will. It’s a lofty goal but from my experience I’m finding it a big benefit. It’s not necessarily “necessary” but it sure is great!

By the way, I don’t make teaching back a song part of a lesson (although it happens sometimes when students show each other things). But I do ask questions about tools and strategies and also ask them to think about components and commonalities (cross pollination). When people see the Honey Dew chords in Old Man River it’s so much easier to remember what to do.

Laurie Richards, Nebraska

Interesting thoughts! This particular issue never entered my mind until I had students learning the 2nd section of Fur Elise in level 2. As a precursor to explaining what the “5” and “6” on the page meant, I would turn back to level 1 and ask what the numbers 1 – 4 represented. I was shocked at how many students had forgotten in the time it took to get from the end of level 1 to the end of level 2. They could play it thoughtlessly but didn’t retain the learning clues.

In this case, the 5 and 6 are completing a sequence that began in level 1, so to understand the whole picture they need to remember. Not to mention, in Level 5, those numbers reappear when they learn the original composition.

That is a specific example, but I personally think it’s important in general to retain an understanding of the diagrams. The learning clues may be used again in another song, plus it helps them to be able to “chunk” the music into sections that are much easier to remember. I think retaining these clues can help them immensely later down the line when they are reading. They get their original instructions from the page; then when they’ve got the notes learned, they may start “seeing” arrows, triangles, chord patterns, etc. because of retaining those clues from their playing-based songs. The song suddenly becomes easier to play and memorize.

It may not work this way for everybody, but I want to encourage that to happen. Of course, this is something that has sort of emerged over the last few years as I’ve taught. Neil has a way of letting things “unfold”, as we know.

Gordon Harvey, Australia

In my experience, there are two distinct phases to learning to play a piece of music.

The first is the information processing phase, where we apply our or someone else’s knowledge and understanding of music to break the piece down into components, choose strategies etc, translating information, be it notation, a video, or verbal instructions, into physical steps on the keyboard. It’s essentially a mental process.

The second occurs after (and to a lesser extent during) the first phase, when we’re clear what we’re doing and we begin repeating the physical actions. At this point the muscles and the parts of the brain that control them develop their own memory. This memory can far outlast our brain’s memory of the information processing. Once this second phase begins, the brain loses interest and lets the fingers do the work. After all, says the brain, they’re doing a great job, why should I put any effort into retaining the memory of a process that’s no longer needed? Besides, the brain can now take up the role of musical director, free to think about the finer details of how those muscles are to play the song, and just enjoying the experience.

Also it’s very easy for we teachers to forget that we’re also learning to teach by repetition. In other words, as we do more teaching, we get to know the strategies as thoughtlessly as the playing. It’ll never be quite the same experience for the student, who after all, deep down just wants to play!

So it’s natural that students will forget the strategies once the muscle memory has taken over. That’s why we call it thoughtlessness. However, that’s not an ideal scenario.

For one thing, muscle memory isn’t 100% reliable. I recently had a similar experience to Beth, where I picked up a piece I hadn’t played for several years. For the first few minutes it was completely foreign, then all of a sudden, the fingers took over. It was almost an out-of-body experience where I sat back and just watched my hands expertly traversing the keyboard, thinking “any minute this is going to fall in a heap”, which it eventually did. Since then, I’ve practiced towards the goal of having it fall in a heap less often, but I can see, and as I remember when I first learned the piece, that at my particular level of playing skill, I’m unlikely ever to be perfect at the piece every time I play it.

They say prevention is better than cure, and in this situation the closest thing to prevention is simply to have thoroughly processed the strategies. This means not rushing into training the fingers. It’s very human to want to be able to hear the song, but if we do this too soon we’ll be skimming over the strategies and essentially letting the ears train the fingers. You’ll see this in various ways:

– the good old “I could play it perfectly at home” syndrome

– students who get halfway through a song, make a mistake and have no idea how to correct it

– inconsistent fingering

– students who, on making a mistake, have to go back to the beginning.

Of course, other factors may be involved when this happens, but clearly the more the student is aware of the strategies as they play, the lower the risk of something going wrong.

So it’s better to take time over the strategies, controlling the events, using the practice pad, vocalising instructions, doing hands together and rhythm components in the hands away from the keyboard, maybe spending a week reviewing the materials without touching the instrument. Concepts like positions and fragmenting are tremendously powerful. In a piece like Lullaby it’s great to have students spend a week just mastering the positions before it sounds anything like the song. The occasional lesson, typically at the end of a level, where you just review strategies, is very useful, and the occasional review of the strategies for an individual piece will help. This might be done when you have another project coming up which involves cross-pollination from an earlier one. Also, when you’re reverse engineering a piece as part of the reading process, it’s embarrassing for a student who has played a song well for months to not know how to break it down again, so review soon before then is a good thing.

More broadly, the Simply Music approach of learning a lot of pieces, each with clear strategies, and training ourselves to generate our own strategies – in other words, Learning a Way of Learning – has us thinking more clearly, able to see the bigger picture.

As a student develops a piece, the perfect situation is one where they are letting the fingers do their thing, but being like a commentator: “here’s the part where the bottom note zigzags”, “this is the section with the triangles” or whatever it takes. As pieces become longer, this will become more necessary. As they develop their reading skills, students will use signposts on the page in similar ways, always watching over the automatic behavior of the fingers – a kind of conscious thoughtlessness.

Does all this mean we’ll never have to go back and relearn strategies? Of course not, but at least with our approach, we’re not just stabbing in the dark. It won’t take long and every time we do, we’ve grown stronger.

Yours thoughtlessly